Eating the carrot.

Suggested Listening: Have You Been Good To Yourself - Johnny Frierson

I’m in the RV somewhere between Oroville and Berkeley, CA. There are no clouds in the sky, it’s a perfect powder blue. Out the window is all power lines and mountains so far away they look like a dusty movie backdrop. We’ve got the window cracked because the weather is just right and a little airflow is nice when you’ve got seven people and a dog all farting in the same space. I’ve got my headphones on listening to this Reverend Baron album I’ve recently discovered and been obsessing over. It’s about noon and we’re on a three-hour drive towards our next show after one day off at a KOA to catch up on laundry and real showers.

I’ve been out here on the road for just under a month and we have two weeks left to go. I’m also nine weeks out from my ectopic rupture and the surgery where they removed my right fallopian tube. If I’m being honest, I left for this tour really wrapped up in my grief. I had the luxury of staying home, settling into our new apartment, babying my body and letting my emotional waves come whenever they struck. I know that time was important for me, but I also know not a lot of people have as much time off as I did to process what happened before returning to work. It was hard to imagine connecting with the part of myself that can perform confidently onstage, both physically and mentally. I left for the airport sad, sorry for myself, and resentful that I couldn’t just stay home in my little sensitive bubble.

The first show was hard. I broke down minutes before stage time, mostly out of anxiety that I couldn’t show up the way I wanted to. We performed at an exotic animal zoo (??), which was cool, and the crowd was great, but everything felt surreal. There was literally a mountain lion pacing its cage behind me as we performed, staring out at a camel chewing its cud. I just didn’t feel like I was even in my body. During our song “Changes,” a song I’ve sung more times than it feels like I’ve even uttered my own name, I started choking up, realizing that I was relating to the opening lines more than I often do. I made it through the set but felt exhausted thinking about how long the tour ahead of me was going to feel.

Our next show was Bumpin Uglies and Badfish’s festival at Nelson Ledges in Ohio, a place known for its quirky and enthusiastic sense of community. I was six weeks out from surgery at that point, which meant I’d been cleared by my doctor to lift more than ten pounds again and stop really babying my body. I’d even been to the gym a couple times. Before our set I got to connect with some of the folks there for the show, taking pictures, signing autographs, receiving the sort of jewelry you only find at festivals like this and a stuffed mushroom made from an old Crown Royal bag. There are times when all the socializing makes me anxious and a little depleted, but this time felt totally different, like these people were batteries charging me back up to get onstage.

By showtime I was buzzing. Performing the same songs so many times can create this muscle memory thing where you can almost think about something else entirely while you’re up there, dissociate from the moment and just do the task at hand. This time I felt newer and more alive than I have in years! Singing is such a primal, magical and healing thing, I don’t care if you’re completely tone deaf. Really letting it all out like that is just good for you. Making eye contact with your bandmates while you each add your part to create one sound is crazy, but also easy to take for granted apparently. It was like I was experiencing it for the first time. I’m in a band with my friends!! People are wearing our merch!! And singing our songs!! It’s enough to make you cry happy tears.

You know that feeling when you’ve got a cold and you find yourself lying there telling yourself, “If I could just breathe easily from both nostrils again, I swear I would never take it for granted”? I think that’s how I’ve been feeling about my body. After weeks of needing help getting in and out of bed, not being able to lift my own dog and watching my body stitch itself up, I realize how lucky I am to have a healthy, working body and I want to take care of it. Every day has a little mental checklist: drink lots of water, take your vitamins, eat some real protein (but also have a bit of chocolate), get to bed early if you can but don’t sleep in forever. Wake up and see all this stuff you’ve been driving by. Get out for a walk when you can. Make sure Winnie’s enjoying herself too.

Typically I give up on all these things about midway through the tour and just sort of let my life blow around like an open bag of leaves in the wind, resigning myself to the fact that being on the road just means feeling like shit. But my body isn’t invincible. It’s the only thing I came to earth with, and I want to take care of it.

I’m even making friends with my scar. For the first few weeks it was covered by a bandage, and when the bandage finally came off, I could barely look at it. I definitely didn’t want to touch it. It felt like foreign fibers had been woven into my skin, like this part of my body didn’t quite belong to me anymore. The nerves in the area were numb, so I could actually watch myself touching my own skin without feeling anything. I’ve always had this little ritual of moisturizing my whole body when I get out of the shower, but I’d carefully avoid that area. I think I was rejecting it emotionally as much as physically. Now I’m getting used to it. I touch it when I put on my silicone tape to help with the scarring. I’m not quite ready to love it, but I’m not afraid of it anymore either.

I hate what happened. I hate that I lost the pregnancy and am missing one of my fallopian tubes. I hate that I think about it every time I change my clothes and see my incision scar. I hate that I feel soft in the middle and am still getting my strength back. I hate that I think about it every time I see baby clothes or families on the street. All of that is true.

But something else is happening that I didn’t really see coming. As someone prone to depression my whole life, I imagined this would be the perfect opportunity for that part of me to resurface. This time, I’d have every reason in the world to be sad and stuck. I waited for the heaviness to settle in, but instead, I’ve been finding myself feeling lighter.

One of my favorite things about myself is my capacity for joy, but somewhere along the way I think I started losing sight of it. There’s just so much distraction. You’ve gotta pay bills, further your career, maintain friendships, be productive, take care of your body. It’s easy to get snagged on a million little things that, when you zoom out, don’t really matter all that much. After years of pursuing my dream and not reaching whatever goals and milestones I’d set for myself, consciously or otherwise, I’d gotten cynical. I was so focused on where I thought I should be that I was losing sight of where I actually was. How far we’ve come as a band, how far I’ve come as a person, and just baseline how lucky I am to be alive, getting to experience so many new places, meet so many new people and make an albeit meager living expressing myself and doing what I love. I’m lucky to feel so loved! I’m starting to wonder how much of my own happiness I’ve been getting in the way of. How many opportunities to lean in and pay attention to something small and wonderful have I been missing?

I also celebrated a birthday out here week before last. As long as I can remember, birthdays have made me anxious. This one day that’s supposed to be happy and celebratory has often just felt like an opportunity to look at my life and self-flagellate. To tell myself I’m not where I’m supposed to be, that I’m getting old, or to feel guilty about whatever attention the day brought me. This year I looked in the mirror in a green room bathroom after a shower in Boise, Idaho and admired my skin. I felt grateful that my body had weathered the internal bleeding, the being cut open, the loss, so gracefully. I thought about how much older I could look given how rough my lifestyle can be at times. I wondered if all the fun I get to have was keeping my skin glowy and youthful. I watched text messages and DMs and comments come pouring in and felt lucky for the love\, not undeserving as I sometimes do. I felt happy to be me.

Maybe sometimes the hardest thing to do is just let yourself enjoy what’s already happening. I’ve spent so much time thinking about what comes next, what I should be doing, where I should be by now. And lately I’ve been wondering what I might be missing while I’m busy worrying about all of that. It feels like the most psychedelic couple months of my life have hit some sort of hard factory reset.

Of course, I know when I get home there’s a box of grief waiting for me. Yesterday I was having some stuff happening with my body that led me to call my doctor, and just that familiar anxiety of “oh god, what’s happening,” paired with talking to my doctor and insurance, sent me into a mini-spiral that caught me off guard after so many good days in a row. The other day I tried listening to this Haruomi Hosono record that I really love, but it’s themed around motherhood and the maternal energy of the earth, and I had to go sit in the RV bathroom and sob for a couple minutes in private. I know when I have the literal and emotional space to visit some of these feelings again, they’ll probably still be pretty vibrant. But it’s been nice to have a reminder that they aren’t the only colors on the palette. That I’m not just a patient. I’m also strong and fun and exist outside my living room.

I’ve heard about this idea of eating the carrot instead of chasing it. Like, maybe I should just be enjoying the fact that I’m doing this right now instead of fretting over what I’ll be doing in the future. I don’t know how long this clarity will last. I hope I can hang onto some of it when I get home. I’m sure I’ll get distracted again, get caught up in things that don’t really matter, forget some of what feels so obvious to me right now. But someday, I’ll be 80 (if I’m lucky) and I won’t be in this RV seeing parts of the country that some people never will, getting farted on by my friends and cute dog, and I’ll miss it. I’ll wish I had soaked it all in more.